Sharpe's Trafalgar (27 page)

“Well done, quartermaster,” Chase said, pretending he had felt no qualms during the
maneuver. “Well done, Pucelles! Mister Holderby! Muster a work party and break out some
yellow paint!”

“Why yellow?” Sharpe asked.

“Every other ship has yellow hoops,” Chase said, gesturing back down the long line,
“while ours are like the French hoops, black.” Only the upper masts were made from single
pine trunks while the lower were formed from clusters of long timbers that were bound and
seized by the iron hoops. “In battle,” Chase said, “maybe that’s all anyone will note of us.
And they’ll see black hoops and think we’re a Frog ship and pour two or three decks of good
British gunnery into our vitals. Can’t have that, Sharpe! Not for a few slaps of paint!” He
turned like a dancer, unable to contain his elation, for his ship was in the line of
battle, the enemy was at sea and Horatio Nelson was his leader.

The British fleet tacked after dark, the signal passed on from ship to ship by lanterns
hung in the rigging. Now, instead of sailing northward, the fleet headed south, staying
parallel to the enemy ships, but out of their sight. The wind had dropped, but a long swell
ran from the western darkness to lift and drop the ponderous hulls. It was a long night.
Sharpe went on deck once and saw the stern lanterns of the Conqueror reflecting from the
seas ahead, then he gazed eastward as a brilliant flame showed briefly on the horizon.
Lieutenant Peel, bundled against the cold, reckoned it was one of the frigates setting off
a firework to confuse the enemy. “Keeping them awake, Sharpe, keeping them worried.” Peel
slapped his gloved hands together and stamped his feet on the deck.

“Why are they sailing south?” Sharpe asked. He was shaking. He had forgotten just how
the cold could bite.

“The good Lord alone knows,” Peel said cheerfully, “and He ain’t telling me. They aren’t
going to cover an invasion force in the Channel, that’s for certain. They’re probably
heading for the Mediterranean which means they’ll keep on south until they’re clear of the
shallows off Cape Trafalgar, then they can run east toward the Straits. Does your chess
improve?”

“No,” Sharpe said, “too many rules.” He wondered whether Lady Grace would risk coming to
his cabin, but he doubted it, for the night-shrouded ship was unnaturally busy as men
readied themselves for the morning. A seaman brought him a cup of Scotch coffee and he
drank the bitter liquid, then chewed on the sweetened bread crumbs that gave the coffee its
flavor.

“This will be my first battle,” Peel admitted suddenly.

“My first at sea,” Sharpe said.

“It makes you think,” Peel said wistfully.

“It’s better once it starts,” Sharpe suggested. “It’s the waiting that’s hard.”

Peel laughed softly. “Some clever bugger once remarked that nothing concentrates the
mind so much as the prospect of being hanged in the morning.”

“I doubt he knew,” Sharpe said. “And besides, we’re the hangmen tomorrow.”

“So we are, so we are,” Peel said, though he could not hide the fears that gnawed at him.
“Of course nothing might happen,” he said. “The buggers might give us the slip.” He went to
look at the compass, leaving Sharpe to stare into the darkness. Sharpe stayed on deck
until he could abide the cold no longer, then went and shivered in his confining cot that
felt so horribly like a coffin.

He woke just before dawn. The sails were flapping and he put his head out of his cabin
door and asked Chase’s steward what was happening. “We’re wearing ship, sir. Going north
again, sir. There’s coffee coming, sir. Proper coffee. I saved a handful of beans because
the captain does like his coffee. I’ll bring you shaving water, sir.”

Once he had shaved, Sharpe pulled on his clothes, draped his borrowed cloak about his
shoulders and went on deck to find that the fleet had indeed turned back to the north.
Lieutenant Haskell now had the watch and he reckoned that Nelson had been running
southward to keep out of the enemy’s sight so that they would not use the excuse of his
presence to return to Cadiz, but as the first gray light seeped along the eastern horizon
the admiral had turned his fleet in an attempt to get between the enemy and the Spanish
port.

The wind was still light so that the line of great ships lumbered northward at less than a
man’s walking pace. The sky brightened, burnishing the long swells with shifting bands of
silver and scarlet. Euryalus, the frigate which had dogged the enemy fleet ever since it
had left harbor, was now back with the fleet, while to the east, almost in line with the
burning sky where the sun rose, was a streak of dirty cloud showing against the horizon.
That streak was the topsails of the enemy, blurred by distance.

“Good God.” Captain Chase had emerged on deck and spotted the far sails. He looked tired,
as though he had slept badly, but he was dressed for battle, doing honor to the enemy by
wearing his finest uniform which was normally stored deep in a sea chest. The gold on the
twin epaulettes gleamed. His tasseled hat had been brushed till it shone. His white stockings
were of silk, his coat was neither faded by the sun nor whitened by salt, while his sword
scabbard had been polished, as had the silver buckles on his clean shoes. “Good God,” he
said again, “those poor men.”

The decks of the British ships were thick with men, all staring eastward. The Pucelle had
seen the French and Spanish fleet on the previous day, but this was the first glimpse for
the other crews of Nelson’s ships. They had crossed the Atlantic in search of this enemy,
then sailed back from the West Indies and, in the last few days, they had tacked and worn
ship, sailed east and west, north and south, and some had wondered if the enemy was at sea at
all, yet now, as if summoned by a demon of the sea, thirty-four enemy ships of the line
showed on the horizon.

“You’ll not see its like again,” Chase told Sharpe, nodding toward the enemy fleet. His
steward had brought a tray with mugs of proper coffee onto the quarterdeck and Chase
gestured that his officers should be served first, then took the last cup. He looked up at
the sails which alternately stretched in the wind then slackened as the fitful gusts
passed. “It will take hours to come up with them,” he said moodily.

“Maybe they’ll come to us,” Sharpe said, trying to raise Chase’s spirits that seemed
dampened by the dawn and the pitiful wind.

“Against this sorry excuse for a breeze? I doubt it.” Chase smiled. “Besides, they won’t
want battle. They’ve been stuck in harbor, Sharpe. Their sail handling will be poor, their
gunnery rusty, their morale down in the mud. They’d rather run away.”

“Why don’t they?”

“Because if they run east from here they’ll end up on the shoals of Cape Trafalgar, and if
they run north or south they know we’ll intercept them and beat them to smithereens, and that
means they have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go, Sharpe. We have the weather gauge, and that’s
like having the higher ground. I just pray we catch them before dark. Nelson fought the
Nile in the dark and that was a triumph, but I’d rather fight in daylight.” He drained his
coffee. “Is that really the last of the beans?” he asked the steward.

“It is, sir, except for those that got wetted in Calcutta, sir, and they’re growing
fur.”

“They might grind, though?” Chase suggested.

“I wouldn’t feed ‘em to a pig, sir.”

The Victory had been flying a signal which ordered the British column to form their
proper order, which was little more than an encouragement for the slower ships to press
on more sail and close the intervals in the line, but now that signal was hauled down and
another flew in its place.

“Prepare for battle, sir,” Lieutenant Connors reported, though it was scarcely
necessary, for every man aboard except the landlubbers like Sharpe had recognized the
signal. And the Pucelle, like the other warships, was already preparing, indeed the men
had been readying their ship all night.

Sand was scattered on the decks to give the barefooted gunners a better grip. The men’s
hammocks, as they were every morning, were rolled tight and brought on deck where they were
laid in the hammock nettings that surmounted the gunwale. The packed hammocks, secured
in the net trough and lashed down under a canvas rain cover, would serve as a bulwark
against enemy musket fire. Up aloft a bosun was leading a dozen men who were securing the
ship’s great yards, from which the vast sails hung, with lengths of chain. Other men were
reeving spare halliards and sheets so that heavy coils of rope were forever tumbling
through the rigging to thump on the decks. “They like slashing our rigging to bits,”
Captain Llewellyn told Sharpe. “The Dons and the Frogs both, they like to fire at the masts,
see? So the chains stop the yards falling and the spare sheets are there if the others are
shot through. Mind you, Sharpe, we’ll lose a stick or two before the day’s out. It rains
blocks and broken spars in battle, it does!” Llewellyn anticipated that dangerous
downpour with relish. “Is your cutlass sharp?”

“It could do with a better edge,” Sharpe admitted.

“Forrard on the weather deck,” Llewellyn said, “by the manger, there’s a man with a
treadle wheel. He’ll be glad to hone it for you.”

Sharpe joined a queue of men. Some had cutlasses, others had boarding axes while many
had fetched down the boarding pikes which stood in racks about the masts on the upper decks.
The goats, sensing that their routine had changed, bleated piteously. They had been milked
for the last time and now a seaman rolled up his sleeves before slaughtering them with a
long knife. The manger, with its dangerously combustible straw, was being dismantled and
the goats’ carcasses would be packed in salt for a future meal. The first beast struggled
briefly, then the smell of fresh blood cut through the ship’s usual stench.

Some of the men invited Sharpe to go to the head of the queue, but he waited his turn as
the nearby gunners teased him. “Come to see a proper battle, sir?”

“You’d never win a scrap without a real soldier, lads.”

“These’ll win it for us, sir,” a man said, slapping the breech of his
twenty-four-pounder on which someone had chalked the message “a pill for Boney.” The mess
tables, on which the gunners ate, were being struck down into the hold. As much wooden
furniture as possible was removed from the decks above water so that they could not be
reduced to splinters that whirled lethally from every strike of enemy shot. Sharpe’s cot
and chest were already gone, as was all the elegant furniture from Chase’s quarters. The
precious chronometers and the barometer had been packed in straw and taken down to the
hold. Some ships hoisted their more valuable furniture high into the rigging in hopes
that it would be safe, while others had entrusted it to the ships’ boats that were being
launched and towed astern to keep them from enemy gunnery.

A gunner’s mate sharpened the cutlass on the wheel, tested its edge against his thumb,
then gave Sharpe a toothless grin. “That’ll give the buggers a shave they’ll never forget,
sir.”

Sharpe tipped the man sixpence, then walked back down the deck just in time to see the
paneled walls of Chase’s quarters being maneuvered down the quarterdeck stairs on their
way to the hold. The simpler wooden bulkheads from the officers’ cabins and the wardroom
at the stern of the weather deck had already been struck down so that now, for the first
time, Sharpe could see the whole length of the ship, from its wide stern windows all the way
to where men swept up the last straw of the manger in the bows of the ship. The Pucelle was
being stripped of her frills and turned into a fighting machine. He climbed to the
quarterdeck and saw that was similarly empty. The wide space beneath the long poop,
instead of holding cabins, was now an open sweep of deck from the wheel to the windows of
Chase’s day cabin. The dining cabin had vanished, Sharpe’s quarters were gone, the
pictures had been taken below and the only remaining luxury was the black-and-white
checkered canvas carpet on which the two eighteen-pounder guns stood.

Connors, stationed on the poop to watch for the flagship’s signals which were being
repeated by the frigate Euryalus, called down to Chase. “We’re to bear up in succession on
the flagship’s course, sir.” Chase just nodded and watched as the Victory, leading the
line, swung to starboard so that she was now heading straight for the enemy. The wind, such
as it was, came from directly behind her and Captain Hardy, doubtless on Nelson’s
orders, already had men up on his yards to extend the slender poles from which he would
hang his studdingsails.

Nine ships behind the Pucelle another three-decker swung to starboard. This was the
Royal Sovereign, the flagship of Admiral Collingwood, Nelson’s second-in-command. Her
bright copper gleamed in the morning light as the ships behind followed her eastward.
Chase looked from the Victory to the Royal Sovereign, then back to the Victory again. “Two
columns,” he said aloud, “that’s what he’s doing. Making two columns.”

Even Sharpe could understand that. The enemy fleet formed a ragged line that stretched
for about four miles along the eastern horizon and now the British fleet was turning
directly toward that line. The ships turned in succession, those at the front of the fleet
curling around to make a line behind the Victory and those at the back following in the
Royal Sovereign’s wake, so that the two short lines of ships were sailing straight for the
enemy like a pair of horns thrusting at a shield.

“We’ll set studdingsails when we’ve turned, Mister Haskell,” Chase said.

“Aye aye, sir.”

The Conqueror, the fifth ship in Nelson’s column and the one immediately ahead of the
Pucelle, turned toward the enemy, showing Sharpe her long flank which was painted in
stripes of black and yellow. The Conqueror’s gunports, all on the yellow bands, were
painted black to give her a half-checkered appearance.

“Follow her, quartermaster,” Chase said, then walked to the table behind the wheel
where the ship’s log lay open. He dipped the pen in ink and made a new entry. “6:49 am. Turned
east toward the enemy.” Chase put the pen down, then took a small notebook and a stub of
pencil from his pocket. “Mister Collier!”

“Sir?” The midshipman looked pale.

“I will trouble you, Mister Collier, to take this notebook and pencil and to make a
copy of any signals you see this day.”

“Aye aye, sir!” Collier said, taking the book and pencil from Chase.

Lieutenant Connors, the signal lieutenant, overheard the order from his place on the
poop deck. He looked offended. He was an intelligent young man, quiet, red-haired and
conscientious, and Chase, seeing his unhappiness, climbed to him. “I know that logging
the signals is your responsibility, Tom,” he said quietly, “but I don’t want young
Collier brooding. Keep him busy, eh? Let him think he’s doing something useful and he
won’t worry so much about being killed.”